Celebrity Life
The Mars Volta’s ‘La Realidad de los Sueños’ Is a Time Machine, a Treasure Chest, a Key
Much like Mars Volta's music, each spin through the box set reveals new facets, colors, snippets of words, and imagery
Netflix’s Pensive Stowaway Tangles with Issues of Morality, and Selfhood, in Space
The space drama starring Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick and Daniel Dae Kim is sometimes boring, but still builds a mood of dread and contemplative ennui
Can the Ambitious, Uneven Rutherford Falls Do for American History What The Good Place Did for Philosophy?
The new sitcom co-created by 'The Good Place' mastermind Michael Schur, star Ed Helms and Sierra Teller Ornelas begins, like so many conflicts these days, with a monument to a dead white guy
PBS’s Fascinating Philly D.A. Poses a Crucial, Timely Question: Can Our Broken Criminal Justice System Really Be Fixed?
What might the day-to-day work of dismantling systemic racism, mass incarceration and police power actually look like?
Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Spy With Soul in The Courier—But He’s Not the Only Reason to Watch
Cumberbatch plays real life Cold War spy Greville Wynne
Kate Winslet’s Mare of Easttown Is the Rare Crime Drama That Cares About Its Characters
'Mare of Easttown' sounds like it’s going to be a YA equestrian novel or a Masterpiece miniseries set on a Victorian farm. In fact, it is a poignant, richly observed, if occasionally over-the-top HBO crime drama
Big Shot Is a Surprisingly Lovable Sports Drama From Franchise-Crazy Disney+
The universes are expanding. The cinematic universes, I mean. Disney+ got off to a slow start with its original content rollout, relying largely, in its first year of existence, on the streaming sphere’s most voluminous archive of children’s entertainment, a few no-brainer expansions of popular brands (the Muppets, High School Musical), several mildly interesting unscripted…
The Controversy Around Amazon’s Them Underscores the Trouble With Realistic Violence in Genre TV
If you believe Twitter, the place nuance goes to die, Amazon's latest is either flawless or a crime against humanity. Neither is fully true
Joss Whedon’s Confusing, Overcrowded The Nevers Indulges in the Laziest Habits of TV’s Dickens Obsession
There was a time, not so long ago, when to describe a television show as Dickensian was to pay it the highest possible compliment. But peak TV tends to debase every marker of prestige it touches, through infinite imitations
Even the Subpar Superhero Comedy Thunder Force Can’t Fully Extinguish Melissa McCarthy’s Gifts
Because superhero movies are here to stay, you almost can’t blame filmmakers for trying to reclaim them—for believing they can make better ones, or at least just smarter ones, than those that emerge from the tireless Marvel and DC Play-Doh Pumper. Thunder Force, starring Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer as a duo of superpower-enhanced Chicago…
HBO’s Exterminate All the Brutes Is a Radical Masterpiece About White Supremacy, Violence and the History of the West
'I Am Not Your Negro' director Raoul Peck takes on the unwieldy task of telling the “origin story” of white supremacy, in what may well be the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television
Idris Elba Brings a Regal Urban Cowboy to Life in Concrete Cowboy
Elba plays a member of a community of riders in North Philadelphia whose stables lie in the crosshairs of developers